Music Festivals Trivia
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50 free Music Festivals trivia questions with answers — music quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Music festivals are where pop history gets made in a single weekend: a farmer's field that became a national institution, a benefit show that a billion people watched, a dance party in a Belgian town that now sells out in hours. Every festival has a founding story, a site with an owner, and a set everyone who was there still talks about. These 50 questions roam from the 1960s to the 2020s and across five continents. They cover the founders and the farms, first editions and record crowds, the headliners who made history and the traditions and ticket rules that grew up around them. It suits pub-quiz regulars, festival veterans and anyone who has ever queued for a portaloo at dawn. Every answer comes with a short explanation and a source.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which dairy farmer hosted the first Glastonbury festival on his Worthy Farm in 1970, charging £1 a ticket?
Michael Eavis
Michael Eavis was moved to host it after seeing Led Zeppelin at the 1970 Bath Festival of Blues; the Kinks dropped out as headliners and Tyrannosaurus Rex topped the bill instead.
Q 02Whose 21-minute Wembley set at Live Aid was voted rock's greatest live performance in a 2005 industry poll?
Queen
Queen opened with a shortened 'Bohemian Rhapsody' and closed with 'We Are the Champions', a six-song set the BBC's David Hepworth called the greatest display of community singing the old stadium had seen.
Q 03Where did Oasis play to 125,000 people a night in August 1996, after more than 2.5 million applied for tickets?
Knebworth House
Knebworth House's shows had a guest: Stone Roses guitarist John Squire joined Oasis on stage for Champagne Supernova and I Am the Walrus.
Q 04Italy's Sanremo Music Festival, held since 1951, was the model for which international competition launched in 1956?
Eurovision Song Contest
The Eurovision Song Contest began with just seven countries, each singing two songs, and the first winner was the host nation, Switzerland.
Q 05Which Texas publication's staff launched the SXSW festival in Austin in 1987?
The Austin Chronicle
The Austin Chronicle's staff planned the first SXSW in secret meetings at the paper's offices and expected 150 registrants; about 700 turned up.
Q 06Which rapper headlined Glastonbury in 2019 wearing a Union Jack stab-proof vest designed by Banksy?
Stormzy
Stormzy's vest turned up again that autumn, on display in a shop that Banksy set up in Croydon, south London.
Q 07Which city has hosted the free Donauinselfest, a three-day party on a Danube island, since 1984?
Vienna
Vienna's festival is hosted by the city's Social Democratic party, whose organisers count close to three million visits over the three days.
Q 08Which Milwaukee festival, first held in 1968, did Guinness World Records certify in 1999 as the world's largest?
Summerfest
Summerfest fills Henry Maier Festival Park beside Lake Michigan, yet its inaugural 1968 edition was scattered across 35 sites and included a film festival and an air show.
Q 09Which prime minister's granddaughter Arabella co-organised the free 1971 Glastonbury Fayre?
Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill's granddaughter shunned interviews, yet the children's area she went on to organise at the festival became the seed of the charity Children's World.
Q 10Whose claim that hip-hop was wrong for Glastonbury led Jay-Z to open his 2008 headline set with 'Wonderwall'?
Noel Gallagher
Noel Gallagher's criticism got a tongue-in-cheek answer: Jay-Z, the first major hip-hop act to headline the festival, walked on strumming the Oasis anthem before his own set.
Q 11Who closed Glastonbury 2011 on the Sunday night, becoming the first woman to headline the festival since 1999?
Beyoncé
Beyoncé followed U2 and Coldplay as headliner and mixed her own hits with covers, among them Kings of Leon's Sex on Fire and Alanis Morissette's You Oughta Know.
Q 12Which 2005 concert series reunited Pink Floyd's classic line-up after 24 years?
Live 8
Live 8 was staged days before the G8 summit at Gleneagles to press its leaders over world poverty, and it was the last time Pink Floyd's classic four played together.
Q 13Which benefit did Willie Nelson launch in Champaign, Illinois in September 1985 after a Bob Dylan remark at Live Aid?
Farm Aid
Q 21Which Canadian city hosts the jazz festival that Guinness World Records certified in 2004 as the world's largest?
Montreal
Montreal closes downtown streets to traffic for the festival and stages hundreds of free outdoor concerts alongside its ticketed indoor shows.
Q 22Creamfields, the dance festival first held in Winchester in 1998, grew out of a superclub in which English city?
Liverpool
Liverpool's Cream began as a weekly house night in 1992; the club night ended in 2002 and its venue has since been demolished, but the festival it spawned carries on.
Q 23Which lager sponsor gave Scotland's T in the Park Festival, held annually from 1994 to 2016, the T in its name?
Tennent's
Farm Aid drew 80,000 to Memorial Stadium and has run nearly every year since, after Dylan suggested from the Live Aid stage that some money should go to American family farmers.
Q 14Lollapalooza gave up touring in 2005 to become a destination festival in which Chicago lakefront space?
Grant Park
Grant Park's 2005 relaunch offered 70 acts on five stages, more variety than the travelling festival Perry Farrell started in 1991 ever managed.
Q 15Which capital hosts Sziget, the week-long island festival that began in 1993 as a student event?
Budapest
Budapest's festival started as Diáksziget (Student Island), ran so far over budget that the losses took until 1997 to repay, and spent 1996–2001 as Pepsi Sziget.
Q 16Rock am Ring, founded by promoter Marek Lieberberg in 1985, takes its name from which German motor-racing circuit?
Nürburgring
The Nürburgring's paddock in the Eifel hills hosts it, while twin Rock im Park runs the same weekend 200 miles away on Nuremberg's Zeppelinfeld with a near-identical line-up.
Q 17Which Indian state hosted the first Sunburn dance festival on one of its beaches in December 2007?
Goa
Goa lost Sunburn to Pune in Maharashtra from 2016, then won it back in 2019 when the festival returned to Vagator.
Q 18Lollapalooza's first edition outside the United States was staged in April 2011 in which South American capital?
Santiago
Santiago's O'Higgins Park hosted it, and the success spawned Lollapalooza Brazil at São Paulo's Jockey Club a year later.
Q 19Vive Latino, the Ibero-American rock festival held almost every year since 1998, takes over which capital?
Mexico City
Mexico City's 2020 edition went ahead on 14 and 15 March as the pandemic began, even though more than a dozen acts pulled out.
Q 20Which Australian festival debuted in Sydney in 1992 with Nirvana supporting headliners the Violent Femmes?
Big Day Out
Big Day Out was founded by promoters Ken West and Vivian Lees at the Hordern Pavilion, and grew from that one-city show into an annual touring festival across Australia.
Tennent's festival had to leave its long-time home at Balado because a North Sea oil pipeline ran beneath the site, and it lasted only two more years at Strathallan Castle.
Q 24Which English racing circuit hosted Monsters of Rock from 1980 and has been home to Download since 2003?
Donington Park
Donington Park's Download took a name that was then a dirty word in an industry fighting file-sharing, while Monsters of Rock began there as the last date of a 1980 Rainbow tour.
Q 25Reading Festival gained a twin site in 1999, sharing its bill with which northern English city?
Leeds
Leeds took the second leg because demand kept rising, and the twin later moved to Bramham Park; Reading itself began life in 1961 as the National Jazz Festival at Richmond.
Q 26Which skate-shoe brand became title sponsor of Kevin Lyman's Warped Tour after its first run in 1995?
Vans
Vans stayed attached until the 2018 edition that Lyman billed as the final full cross-country run, with only three 25th-anniversary events following in 2019.
Q 27Which magazine's 25th-anniversary party in 1995 became an annual New Orleans festival of Black music and culture?
Essence
Essence meant it as a one-off, but 142,000 turned up that first July weekend and the organisers made it an annual fixture.
Q 28Tomorrowland's short-lived US spin-off TomorrowWorld ran from 2013 to 2015 near which city?
Atlanta
Atlanta's last edition, in 2015, was hit by rain that left thousands of festival-goers stranded, and the parent company's bankruptcy months later ended plans to return.
Q 29Electric Daisy Carnival, begun by Insomniac in Los Angeles in 1997, moved its flagship in 2011 to which Nevada venue?
Las Vegas Motor Speedway
Las Vegas Motor Speedway won the flagship in 2011 after controversy drove the festival out of Los Angeles; a record 525,000 people attended over three nights in 2023.
Q 30Which small Somerset village, not the town of Glastonbury itself, actually borders the festival's Worthy Farm site?
Pilton
Pilton and neighbouring Pylle flank the farm, and the nearest town is actually Shepton Mallet, three miles to the north-east.